It appears that Vonage had something in its patent portfolio that Nortel didn’t like. Several weeks ago Nortel sued Vonage for patent infringement. They just settled for a limited cross license to three patents. Good for Vonage for standing up to Nortel.

Facebook. MySpace. LinkedIn. Plaxo. Gmail. Email Contacts. Bebo. Every individual social networking software product that I use (Dogster, Shelfari, …) Oh how I friend thee. Let me count the ways. I’m already seeing “predictions for 2008” that it will be the year of “friend consolidation.” How exciting. Phase 1 (of at least 10) is starting to appear. You can now see your LinkedIn data inside of Facebook (but you can’t really do much with it – yet.) And of course this isn’t an “official LinkedIn app – just something someone else put together.) Or – using Fuser – you can now see your MySpace data inside of Facebook. Again – you can’t do much with it.

Our friends at IBM are trying to patent the “progress bar.” EDN has an article about it titled U.S. patent office looking for prior art on IBM patent application*.* As a result of the Peer-to-Patent: Community Patent Review process, there’s actually a chance that this stupid patent will not get granted. There are 11 days left to comment on the Pre-Grant Publication Number: 20070220238. If you don’t want to go through the brain damage of setting up an account, just leave a comment on this blog post and I’ll consolidate and post them on the Peer-to-Patent site. If you really want to dig into this yourself because you’ve actually written the code for a progress board, you take a look at the overview and the claims (keep a barf bag handy.)

I spent 45 minutes this morning desmegmafying three new Xbox 360 controllers, three new Wii controllers, a Wii charger, and a bunch of videogames. Thanks to everyone that suggested Wii and Xbox 360 games to me – BioShock ate my morning (after I got the controllers out of their packages.) My experience reminded me of Mark Cuban’s brilliant post from 2006 titled Seagate Leaves me bloody… My right index finger is now sliced, my left palm has a cut on it, and my left index finger is still bleeding a little – five hours later. But I’ve liberated the controllers from their plastic jail, inserted the batteries, and gotten my butt kicked at Wii Table Tennis.

As my Quixotic adventure for abolishing software patents continues, I’m starting to come across essays, examples, and suggestions from software engineers that support and confirm my point of view. Terry Gold of Gold Systems pointed me to an article from Art Reisman, the CEO / CTO at APConnections. Terry is on Art’s advisory board. Let’s start with Art’s recommendation Patents should be allowed for: 1) devices with mechanical components 2) physical compounds that can be weighed on a scale. Patents should never be awarded to: 1) Ideas 2) processes, recipes, software programs I believe that these already have other appropriate means of protection (trade secrets, copyrights).

Creating companies from scratch is really difficult. Every successful entrepreneur knows the daily challenges and struggles that conspire against him. Sometimes the entrepreneur thinks to himself “there must be an easier way.” A long time friend and successful entrepreneur – Steve Munroe – provides a creative solution. I don’t know if I ever explained to you my premise for a business model whose main goal is to own a business that squelches the entrepreneurial drive. It is called Just Gas, the premise being that I would buy a Marina on the lake and just sell gas, nothing else. By naming the business Just Gas, it would force me to not expand into other areas, or maybe leave enough room on the sign so you could expand after a couple of years and sell Ice also, thus: Just Gas and Ice. But that’s it. The focus would force the expansion, entrepreneurial part of the brain to shut down, thus decreasing stress and increasing quality of life. That’s the premise.

The massive proliferation of web services, their corresponding APIs, and the notion that “the web is the platform” has caused me to spend a lot of time in what I call “horizontal land.” This is a special place where software that nits everything together (sometimes nicely, sometimes not so nicely) lives. Our RSS theme and corresponding investments (FeedBurner, NewsGator, and Technorati) arose from one aspect of this problem. Shortly after I started thinking about the implicit web several years ago I hooked up with Eric Norlin. We bounced a bunch of thoughts around and Eric proposed the idea for what became the Defrag Conference. We had the first one in 2007 – I thought it was superb as did a bunch of other people. As a result, we are doing it again in 2008.

I love a good rant. I got one several months ago from Janet Stites in reaction to a post I wrote about financial projections. I asked her if I could publish it and she said “yup.” Here it is. Janet’s thoughts are her own and come from her experience, but I thought her perspective on entrepreneurship and VC’s was a useful perspective to ruminate on. Dear Brad: I’m Janet Stites, cofounder/ former publisher of AlleyCat News now founder/publisher of Talent Pool New [east]. I came across your posting on the issue of projections always being wrong and how you mentioned (in a small way) the value of creating a business which scales. I wish you could open this dialogue on a larger basis with VCs and particularly early stage investors because one’s company can go under while taking the time to create these models. If VCs, early stage and particularly angel investors, would begin to ask for the revenue model, price point, universe of the market, competitive advantage and, from there, try to ascertain how flexible & creative, in terms of tweaking the b-model, the entrepreneur might be if the market changes, war starts, economy falters. Investors might see a lot better deal flow in terms of quality and management in terms of tenacity and the entrepreneur might be able to avoid having to walk away from a potentially great company because his/her credit line has run out…spouse left…child starts college (I remember when the founders of iVillage thought, in 1995, chat was their model and TheStreet.com, thought, in 1996, they would make their fortune off of subscriptions.).

I’m looking for a new running log. I’ve been using Cool Running as my log. They were bought by Active sometime last year. Last month Active discontinued Cool Running and migrated all the data to Active Trainer. I was optimistic that Active had thought this through, as I like the Active folks and think they’ve generally done a great job integrating their acquisitions. To my great disappointment, I discovered that Active Trainer stinks. Cool Running was 95% of what I wanted to track my running. Active Trainer is maybe 50%. Clunky UI, missing data, hard to get at summary information, and a generally crummy user experience.